Sylvie Coyaud, the legendary veteran journalist from Milan, reported the most exciting news: EU Commission is now investing almost € 10 Million into the equivalent of porcine aeronautics, or maybe of alchemy as some described it: Cold Fusion. Specifically, the money will go into two projects to revisit the ridiculous “discovery” of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, who in the 1980ies shocked the world with their claim to have achieved nuclear fusion in a table-top device, basically in a water tub. A reliable, cheap and 100% ecologically clean source of virtually inexhaustible energy, too good to be true, and of course it was. Since then, the scientific community eventually concurred that the results were not reproducible, and Cold Fusion became a cautionary tale of scientific hype and hubris, and only some obscure quacks and loonies kept toiling on that field, claiming magical breakthroughs.
Not anymore, because look what the EU Commission just did.
First, some backstory on where Cold Fusion came from.
Nineteen eighty-nine
You might have heard of the experimental ITER fusion reactor, and indeed there are still some continuing efforts with the boring normal fusion, which is at least real since this is how the Sun generates its energy and which explains why life on Earth, including Fleischmann and Pons, was able to evolve in the first place. The problem with the normal, “hot” fusion seems to be that the only way to get more energy out of an Earth-based fusion setup than initially invested, is to set it off as a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. Which is probably not practical as civil energy source. Terrestrial fusion reactors like ITER consume much more energy then they deliver, plus there is a danger of instability, what with the, you know, radioactive plasma.
Hence, the magic of Fleischmann and Pons, which you can read about at lenght on Wikipedia. In brief, Fleischmann, back then at University of Southampton, UK, and Pons of University of Utah, USA, drew on some ideas from 1920ies to design a table-top electrolytic device consisting of a calorimeter with a palladium electrode dunked into deuterium-rich “heavy water”. Lo and behold, the scientific duo reported that the temperature in the vessel rose way above the normal level without any excess energy being applied. A miracle, cold fusion has happened! No radiation was measured, but who cares. The 1989 study almost made it into Nature, but somehow ended up in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, where this practical joke evaded all suggestions of retractions, which is in turn the reason why we can have the good things of today, like the Hermes and CleanHME consortia.
Two years after the initial 1989 announcement, enough money was burned through to declare Cold Fusion dead, but its corpse never went cold, pardon the pun. There was really more than enough evidence of irreproducibility, and yet Fleischman and Pons did not agree and set lawyers upon critical colleagues and journalists, demanding retractions from them. In fact, 10% of the $5 million grant Pons received for his National Cold Fusion Institute went to fund his lawyers. Having failed to deliver in USA, the duo went in 1992 to France, where they ran the IMRA Lab, a Toyota subsidy (Japan was much into Cold Fusion back then). The entire IMRA institute, back then allegedly trice as big as it is now, was apparently dedicated to working on nothing but Cold Fusion. The new directors Fleischmann and Pons burned through around £ 12 million of Toyota money, and still nothing. Cold Fusion remained elusive. Fleischmann died in 2012, Pons is still alive, but as US American not qualified for EU grants, very unfortunate. More recently, Google tried its hand at Cold Fusion, burned through $10 million by 2019, still nothing. So the EU Commission is now throwing a similar amount of cash onto the pyre, all to celebrate the memory of Fleischmann and Pons.
The Fleischmann and Pons Revival Band
One of the two lucky grant recipients is the “Breakthrough zero-emissions heat generation with hydrogen-metal systems” (HERMES) consortium with €4 million, funded from November 2020 to October 2024. It is led by Pekka Peljo, affiliated with the Universities of Turku and Aalto (Finland), plus other scientists (also Finland), TU Munich (Germany), CNRS (France), Imperial College London (UK), Brno University of Technology (Czechia) and University of Limerick (Ireland). They don’t hide whose ideas they will be implementing, here the official project description summary:
“In 1989, electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made headlines with their claim to have produced excess heat using a simple apparatus working at room temperature. Their experiment involved loading deuterium in a palladium metal. As many experimenters failed to replicate their work, cold fusion remains a controversial topic in the scientific community. Nevertheless, a vociferous minority still believes in this elusive phenomenon. Since 2015, Google has been funding experiments into cold fusion. Although no evidence has been found for this phenomenon, it is clear that much pioneering research remains to be conducted in this poorly explored field.”
I think this is at least honest. Give us €4 million and we promise you to burn it like others burned cash on cold fusion before. Sure you could give this money to proper, serious, research projects instead, but we here do better bullshittery and have fancier universities behind us. And Peljo has the best facial hair of all, admit it.
Update 11.12.2020: as reply to my inquiry to University of Turku, Hermes coordinator Pekka Peljo provided a list of consortium partners:
Aliaxander Bandarenka, Technical University of Munich
Jan Macak, Central European Institute of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic
Frederick Maillard, LEPMI/CNRS, France
Tanja Kallio, Aalto University, Finland
Matthias Vandichell, University of Limerick, Ireland
Stephen Skinner, Imperial College, UK
Update 18.12.20 Peljo clarified that Fleischmann & Pons results were actually reproduced:
“two out of 24 experiments produced excess heat“.
His reference is a 2014 book which authors “worked with Martin Fleischmann and benefitted from his guidance” and openly admit to have written the book “to honour the memory of Martin Fleischmann“. Perfectly unbiased, if you ask me.
The Genius of Celani
The other consortium is “Developing a new source of clean energy” (CleanHME), which receives over €5.5 million from the EU Commission from August 2020 to July 2024. The project summary does not mention Fleischmann & Pons or Cold Fusion at all – unlike young loons like Peljio and his Hermes colleagues, the organisers of CleanHME are namely old loonies who are used to be ridiculed and tread carefully. The official project coordinator is an elderly Polish gentleman, Konrad Czerski of the University of Szczecin. Here is his 2013 presentation on a working Cold Fusion table-top reactor:
The consortium uses circumstantial language to descibe what it’s about, in fact a non-expert like myself would not notice anything:
“With climate change being a major global concern in recent times, new efficient clean energy sources are in high demand, and there has been a rise in the use of many of them, such as solar or wind generators. One very promising energy source is hydrogen–metal energy (HME), which could be used for small mobile systems as well as in stand-alone heat and electricity generators. Unfortunately, little research has been conducted concerning HME. The EU-funded CleanHME project aims to change this.”
Maybe CleanHME wanted to hide who really runs it, but not from Sylvie Coyaud: the man namely is the famous Francesco Celani of National Institute for Nuclear Physics, a reincarnation of Fleischmann’s ghost, obsessed with Cold Fusion for already 30 years, with very little as scientifically useful outcome. This is how Celani is described on his own website, highlights his:
“Francesco Celani arrived at the study of “Cold Fusion“, LENR [low energy nuclear reactions, -LS],, out of “distrust”, as he himself tells us. Indeed, he has always embraced Descartes’ “methodological skepticism” and has always been inspired by the desire for “truth “. Just as Eugene Franklin Mallove denounced in the past the falsification of the data on the “Cold Fusion” experiment by MIT (due to the interests of the establishment of that university linked to the funds for nuclear fission research they already enjoyed), to Francesco Celani we must, recently, also [verb missing already in original Italian, -LS] the courage of the dissemination of the two internal documents, which he himself accidentally discovered, relating to two NASA research on “Cold Fusion“, (that of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons), which validated the results already years ago.
Francesco Celani, in his decades-long work as an Experimental Physicist, has always been animated by a truly scientific spirit (also a worthy interpreter of the tradition of Galileo Galilei’s experimental method). […]His previous participation in the Live Open Science (LOS) methodology, founded by the working group of the ” Martin Fleichmann (sic!) Memorial Project ” in 2012, is unchanged, indeed further strengthened.”
Sounds like Celani is perfectly sane and not at all a conspiracy theorist and an alchemy-inclined looney with an obligatory Galileo complex, no? I cannot imagine a more appropriate scholar to hand over your €5.5 million, but then again, the grant proposal passed peer review, so there.
Now, that weird Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project (MFMP) which Celani (aka the new Galileo) collaborates with, was set up by an Englishman named Paul Hunt and his son Ryan in 2012 after the prophet’s death and as a Celani-fanclub. The rest of the team and their clever plans to manufacture Cold Fusion using Celani’s guidelines, which they call “New Fire” (including photos of the table-top apparatus!) can be found online here. Mysteriously, just when CleanHME funding period started in November 2020, the entire MFMP website quantumheat.org was erased, even the archived records at Wayback Machine wiped clean. As if someone was suddenly ashamed of his friends. But here is something I saved from Google cache for the EU Commission’s perusal: the homepage, the about MFMP page (where it seems the departing soul of Fleischmann entered Celani’s New Fire apparatus or something:
“This last August, just weeks after Martin Fleischmann died, an Italian physicist named Francesco Celani demonstrated a breakthrough experiment at two international conferences”
And, best of all: “The Genius of Celani” page, with an exact instruction by Celani himself on how to build the Cold Fusion machine:
Otherwise, because quacks and loonies always cross-pollinate each other, here are Celani’s MFMP mates posting covidiocies about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectine and Vitamin D on Facebook and Twitter, in between covering CleanHME and Hermes.
Of course Celani and Czerski are not the only ones behind CleanHME, there are also others: Italian, French, Slovakian and Belgian companies, CNRS again, University of Uppsala (Sweden) and other academic institutions in Italy, Poland and Slovenia. Then there is also the seriously named Institute for Solid-State Nuclear Physics (Germany), which is however not really an academic research institution but some business run by Czerski and partners. After the genius Celani and the coordinator Czerski, other key men of CleanHME (Cold Fusion does not work with womenfolk around apparently) are Peter Hagelstein (MIT professor and Cold Fusion enthusiast since 1989), Jirohta Kasagi (emeritus at University of Tohoku, Japan, and qualified Cold Fusion replicator), Matej Lipoglavsek (Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia), Dimiter Alexandrov (Lakehead University, Canada) and Jean-Paul Biberian (another old-school Cold Fusion enthusiast, emeritus at University of Marseille, France, why am I not surprised about Marseille and loonies…)
Seriously, here is the CleanHME meeting programme: not a single woman among the scientific members, pun intended (there seem to be some women doing accounting, management and other secretarial duties). I am by now convinced that a presence of a menstruating person can derail the particle flux in a palladium electrode or something.
Update 18.12.2020 Pekka Peljo, when asked to comment on the scientific reputation of Celani and his CleanHME colleagues, wrote to me:
“But if CleanHME can produce these replications [of their own past results, LS], I’m prepared to keep an open mind. […] they plan to shoot some particles (protons, alphas, maybe neutrons, if I remember correctly) on their materials. This is something that is very much outside of my understanding, but the presentations on this topic during their kick-off meeting were convincing.”
Worth a try!
This Cold Fusion joke is back where we started in 1989: nobody in the scientific community will dare to make fun of Cold Fusion again, now that the EU Commission funds it with €10 million. That is because, with rare exceptions like the Liverpool professor Patricia Murray, academics are often chickenshits, even as full professors always afraid they will be defunded, depublished, delisted and demoted if they say anything to disturb the harmonic flow of scientific bullshittery. Others simply see everything as a potential source of some grant money. Just last year, the Johns Hopkins professor Steven Salzberg taught the public to respect cold fusion research:
“As the scientists themselves pointed out, even though their experiments didn’t produce cold fusion, “this exploration of matter far from equilibrium is likely to have a substantial impact on future energy technologies.” In other words, if we keep trying, who knows what we might find?“
This is a very typical academic argument. There is no stupid or useless research, because when scientists do something, something useful will surely come out of it. This is by the way exactly the reason why the EU Commission decided to bury €1 Billion for something as silly as a computational simulation of a brain, the Human Brain Project flagship. In the worst case the project will provide employment to hundreds of scientists, and they can’t really burn the entire billion without delivering something, anything. Worth remembering that other research projects, with actual science and sanity behind them, received rejections and some such unlucky scientists lost jobs.
So while we may laugh at the €10 million wasted on jokes like Cold Fusion, think of those good and honest scientists who were told to shove their grant proposals. Of course the real reason for the failure of Cold Fusion in the last 30 years was that two respectable scholars simply made it up, there never was anything but their fantasies and criminal energy. A clear case of research fraud with exactly zero consequences for Fleischmann and Pons because this is how academia understands things.
There is no fraud in science
Research misconduct, dear reader, is a very novel invention. Believe it or not, it virtually did not exist before 1990ies. That is not to say scientists started to fake data only recently, of course not. But the academic concept that a scholar, who is the intellectual and moral apex of human evolution, would ever wilfully falsify research results was incomprehensible back in those days. The affairs of Robert Gallo plus that of Theresa Imanishi-Kari and David Baltimore (read here), which started in 1980ies, then progressed into initial misconduct findings, to end with full acquittal in mid-1990ies, eventually woke up the academic community from its blissful idyllic slumber. Nowadays, scientific misconduct is something everyone is aware of, especially sicne it is not just junior scientists, but even some professors who are occasionally found guilty of it.
And yet the actual existence of research fraud is something scientists still struggle to believe in. Sure, there was the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, who admitted to have faked all his research, accepted the sack without fighting back, and even wrote a book about his research fraud, which made Stapel the one and only research fraudster in the entire history of modern science. I am not exaggerating, look up any journalistic piece on research fraud, and it will be always Stapel as the only example.
Those countless others, while guilty of research misconduct and data fakery, are definitely not fraudsters. How so? Well, for one, unlike Stapel, they never admitted to fraud. For another, they officially never intended to deceive, but merely cut corners, took shortcuts, doped a bit, misinterpreted, beautified and guesstimated, but important is: they really believed in their scientific results and faked data in good faith, which is apparently a scientifically objective proof that those results must have been real! Hence: conclusions not affected, the sacred mantra of academic corruption.
This is exactly why the STAP affair (this Guardian article was written by me, it was the first ever case of research fraud I covered as journalist, starting in January 2014) still involved several respectable labs claiming the results of Haruko Obakata‘s magical stem cell reprogramming were actually real. The Japanese Obokata was eventually ousted as a fraudster, but not, for example, her Harvard mentor, STAP mastermind and pathological bullshitter Charles Vacanti. Because, if something has been published by respectable professors in a respectable peer reviewed journal, it cannot be made-up, by definition. It can be sloppy, falsified, even irreproducible, but it cannot be invented out of thin air. Scientists don’t do such things, they are incapable of lowly fraud like mere mortals. Science does not work like this. There must have been something real, because why would they falsify results otherwise, right?
This is exactly why the murderous fraud committed by the surgeon Paolo Macchiarini with “stem cell”-regenerated trachea transplants is everything but history. Sure, Macchiarini is a crook, and guilty of research misconduct and deadly patient abuse, but the official version is: even if Macchiarini is bad, his science is probably very valid. Because it was published in The Lancet (even more so, since it was not retracted). This is also why human experiments with Macchiarini-style trachea transplants continue, what his past collaborators did however was to extinguish all association with the bad guy. As one of Macchiarini-investigators at UCL once told me: “but what if it works?“
The EU Commission wasted €5 million on Macchiarini’s clinical trial which never happened, because the affair exploded thanks to journalist investigation and the murderous surgeon was sacked by the Karolinska Institutet. Which meant nothing else that the EU Commission had to invest another €7 million into another clinical trial, with similar trachea transplant technology, but now led by Macchiarini’s once closest ally turned bitter rival, the UCL professor Martin Birchall. That clinical trial was also terminated before it began, thanks to the work of Patricia Murray (the UK public funders haven’t given up yet though!). Nevertheless, the EU Commission invested €2 million into the a different clinical trial, using a similar regmed technology but on “stem cell” regenerated veins, run by a company founded by Macchiarini’s former collaborator at University of Gothenburg, the unsackable Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson. Whose qualifications to obtain that EU grant were the research misconduct and patient abuse she was previously found guilty of, regarding exactly this same research.
So you see, there is definitely some bureaucratic a desire to prove fraudulent research right by throwing more public money at it, sometimes even given to the very same people. Apparently, there are enough conspiracy nutters, greedy crooks and wilful abettors in the scientific community to approve such research projects via peer review.
This is why it is perfectly logical that the EU Commission will now invest €10 million of public money into a Fleischmann-Pons revival project of Cold Fusion. I expect their next investment will be into the magical semiconductor technology once invented by Jan-Hendrik Schön, heck, for all I know it’s probably already happening.
Update 10.12.2020
For more Cold Fusion insanity, do read Smut Clyde‘s follow-up article here. It also features Andrea Rossi!
Update 14.12.2020
Pekka Peljo now wrote to me again, explaining the history of his Hermes project and the connection to Celani’ CleanHME (with which Hermes did a joint kick-off meeting):
“There are very conflicting results on cold fusion, so when writing the proposal, our starting point was: what if Fleischmann and Pons really saw something? Fleischmann especially is still very respected within the field of electrochemistry: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Developments+in+Electrochemistry%3A+Science+Inspired+by+Martin+Fleischmann-p-9781118694435
According to Scopus, he’s still getting more citations per year than I am.
So when I saw the Nature paper by the Google funded project (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1256-6), and the FET Proactive call, I started to think if there would be something we could do. The idea is to approach the topic with an open mind. And it’s not enough to see something strange once. We need to be able to replicate it, and then try to understand, why something strange is happening. But because it’s a high-risk project, we need to have some other outcomes.
I believe that there is a chance that we may see some strange effects. Otherwise I would no have spend quite a bit of time writing the proposal in the first place. But we have to be prepared for failure. We have identified three research lines that looked interesting to us, and where we had some fresh ideas. But I think it’s still a high probability that we won’t see anything strange. But if we do see something strange, we need to be able to reproduce it, try to identify alternative reasons, systematic errors etc. That’s why are assembling an external advisory board, to receive feedback on what other explanations there could be for unexpected results.
About CleanHME, I’ve seen the presentations during their kick-off meeting, but I haven’t spent time checking the background of the partners. Their approach is also very different from ours. But if they are able to produce results that can be reproduced, I’m willing to keep an open mind.“
This is, Celani and his CleanHME partners all claim to have already achieved one kind of cold fusion or another in their experiments in the past 30 years. I wonder if Dr Peljo read their publications, like this stroke of genius?
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I have just had an insight! Which is that, read correctly, “conclusions not affected” is always true. Reading it incorrectly (as I always have until now), it is a mere rephrasing of “the conclusions are false” (or perhaps “the conclusions remain unproved and unsupported”). But correctly read, it can be rephrased as “I/we, the author(s), who have concluded the results claimed (whether after, during, or before the preparation of this article or of any experiments or experiment-like activities), continue to conclude them!” Conclusion is a state of mind.
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Kind of like believing in “alternative facts”, which is popular in some social circles (and geographical areas) in the US right now.
I do believe there can be an “alternatire research world” where fraudulent researchers just site each other and create their own little fake world full of fake facts and data to support themselves. You just to convince funding agencies that fake data is as good as real stuff.
I have an idea. As a start, if we can convince those who publish alternative facts to move to the geographical areas where these are readily accepted, this could be win-win. But wait a minute, it could be that this already happening…
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Please do Ctrl+F on Slovakia / Slovenia to check if they’re not mixed up (e.g. Ljubljana is the capital of the latter, not the former).
Otherwise, a nice article. Thanks!
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Both countries are involved, but I will fix the Ljubljana error, thanks!
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I wish such palladins of truth as the author of this hit piece would devote as much energy as they employ to deride LENR to expose other fields of public expense on research, that are really draining the public resources under exotic, far fetched and misleading promises as the glaring white elephant of a project called ITER, which pretends that the use of 500 Mw of energy input to create 400 Mw of heat through fusion during 400 seconds is the way forward.
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Just as Eugene Franklin Mallove denounced in the past the falsification of the data on the “Cold Fusion” experiment by MIT
Mallove was editor of the journal / website “Infinite Energy”. Not at all susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Mallove
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From all the things he did you chose to highlight the one fact that fits your derisional pre conceived narrative.
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I see you actively avoid publishing comments contrary to your position, unfair but it’s your site and I should know better, But, let’s make a deal, post an article that mentions the valid criticisms made to the hot fusion approach being used to build the ITER project, and I will never ever complain again about your mockery of LENR. Deal? You can start by commenting unbiased about this article: https://thebulletin.org/2018/02/iter-is-a-showcase-for-the-drawbacks-of-fusion-energy/
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Good morning, read the comment policy section before complaining! Your comments are now online, call back your conspiracy theory.
How does that Deal you offer work, I do exactly what you tell me to do, you stop being upset? I am tempted!
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Dear Leonid,
Hi, my name is Bob Greenyer, I am a volunteer researcher with the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project.
I invite you to do a live zoom chat that will be published on our YouTube channel where we can discuss your feelings about the work the project I volunteer for does and has done.
I feel you need a better understanding of where the field is as you show little understanding in your piece here, so I welcome you asking me any and all questions, face to face, for real-time public consumption and critical assessment.
Kind Regards
Bob Greenyer
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Dear Professor Greenyer,
thank you very much for your kind offer. Indeed, I am humbled by the supreme intellectual abilities of MFMP, which go way beyond building functional cold fusion reactors in your garage. Your MFMP social media profiles offer exquisite cures for COVID-19, which apparently consist of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectine and Vitamin D, mixed in a bucket. My only worry is that you forgot zinc, azithromycine, lactoferrin, Vitamin C and of course, clofoctol suppositories.
But then again, I read that your scholarly omniscience goes even further, into “race realism”, look here are you shitposting white supremacism of that toxic racist Stefan Molyneaux on your MFMP Facebook:
So, my suggestion: do kindly find someone else to interview.
Leonid Schneider MSc PhD (no honours at all)
PS: why did you delete your website? Go on, tell us.
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Dear Leonid,
Firstly, I am not, and have never claimed to be a professor or even have a PhD, though many people with those academic titles have consulted with the MFMP to enhance their LENR research activities and/or work safely with the technology family, including those in both the military and civilian research fields.
The website is not deleted, just one of the several facts you got wrong which are demonstrable.
Early in the year, one German follower of the MFMP who was diagnosed with COVID19 was given a prescription of HCQ, this promptly cleared up his condition. He forwarded me the balance, when I had it, it helped me. Many of the researchers in the field of LENR are old and in the highest risk groups, any data driven therapeutics is of strong interest to them – no one can do anything if they are not healthy. The MFMP is a not-for-profit community interest organisation, our community is the international LENR community, if you knew something about the community, you would know why the postings are relevant to that community.
Why don’t you look into the research of the effectiveness of Ivermectin and Vitamin D? You have proven you know basically nothing about LENR. Of course it would take scientific integrity and an impartial mindset to do either, plus effort, so I don’t expect you to.
I am not asking to interview you, I am giving you an opportunity to ask me any questions in a live way – so you can prove your competence to have an opinion about the field. Failing that, one can only assume you know nothing of value or import as your article demonstrates amply.
Kind Regards
Bob Greenyer
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The website is not deleted? Is it an English language problem, Bob?
We shall try the John Cleese approach then.
Why is your quantumheat.org website annulled, cancelled, erased, expunged, obliterated, extinguished, extirpated, wiped out, annihilated, undone? Why is it an ex-website?
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I think it is more a web user issue, perhaps you need to clear your browser cache, all good here
http://www.quantumheat.org
quantumheat.org is LIVE, WORKING, RUNNING, OPERATIONAL, FUNCTIONAL, AVAILABLE bla, bla, bla.
You up to asking me any more basic questions?
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Very nice of you to put it back on, the world needs some comedy relief.
Now why don’t you tell us now exactly what your collaboration with Francesco Celani involves?
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Oh, and since you bang on about Vitamin D but refuse talking about your support for white supremacism of Molyneaux (which actually fits), here is something for you:
https://forbetterscience.com/2020/09/28/we-reached-the-stage-where-vitamin-d-is-the-cure-for-covid-19/
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One of my best friends at school was Hong Kong Chinese, I lived in southern India for best part of a decade, transferring my skills to 1 score Indians, paying them all the while and profiting nothing. When I left to go full-time volunteering for the MFMP, I gave them my equipment and software and continued to pay them for a further 2 years. I also have two children with my Vietnamese wife.
The fact that there is a video talking about making the most of the time we have on Earth on the MFMP FB site, does not give you permission or reason to make personally slanderous comments about me.
In fact, looking at your vacuous blog post above, you appear to revel in irrelevant personal attacks. Is that the way you are by nature or is a result of the company you keep?
I have offerred you an open ended, recorded, live zoom session to discuss any questions you have about my volunteering for the MFMP and the LENR field in general, I would be happy to discuss our work verifying the claims or Francesco Celani. If you want to have some competence in the conversation, I suggest you review the videos on our YouTube channel relevant to Celani and the scores of articles on our site. It will take you a good few 100 hours to do it justice.
At a basic level, we operated completely independent of Celani, we received clarifications of what he did when we asked and free access to his treated wires – the rest was completely funded by donations from the community, without any 3rd party having an ability to influence what choices we made in our verifications.
Starting 14/12/12, we reliably produced evidence of excess heat in a similar order of magnitude to his claims in a range of reactor structures, though not practical for industrial use. We published our data real-time.
In late 2013, we were also able to repeatedly produce radiation spikes, on demand (see ‘gamma’) when we added fresh hydrogen to an active cell, something that was replicated within 24 hours by Jean-Paul Biberian and which almost immediately gained interest around the world with many researchers sending us reports of similar observations. One party that contacted us and offerred help was Earthtech Texas. It was not until 2017 that we realised that that organisation was set-up by Dr. Hal Puthoff. A few years later, we had a radiation spike in a Ni + Li + Al + H cell, it looked like a beta-burst and there was no characteristic x-rays. It took out our power monitor for a little while and saturated our scintillator. We called this event that occurred in California, but caught by a follower who was watching the live data feed in italy – “Signal”.
We now understand that both events were likely due to the dishevelment of what Ken Radford Shoulders called Exotic Vacuum Objects (EVOs). A Japanese nuclear scientist Takaaki Matsumoto, who eventually conceded in 2001 in Fusion Technology that EVOs were likely the cause of what he had seen since 1989, talked about the non-standard radiation coming out that fooled scintillators and GM tubes. I looked at his 1995 paper here:
Hal Puthoff arranged for money to support Ken Shoulders’ investigation of John Hutchison’s findings that came out of the laters investigations and extensions of Tesla technology. Ken, the inventor of the Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer and the father of microelectronics, spent the last 33 years of his life on this work. He wrote a book on the subject of the early part of his studies in 1987 in order to prevent classification of the patents he was filing.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G_7yHQrRVPOMAPheiUnNF73woc-m4MJF/view
When the LHC was switched on and basically died immediately requiring a 9 month repair, Francesco Celani was called in to give guidance on the damage they found (not disclosed to public) which some CERN scientists had recognised as similar to marks found in LENR research. It is very likely that these marks were due to EVO strike marks. Many people in the field are beginning to recognise the reality of EVOs and their ‘Strange Radiation’ quanta which together can account for everything from lack of standard radiation to transmutation to radionuclide stabilisation to even proton decay. The public research in the west is far behind that of the Russian Federation. The Russian ‘Solin’ had already established that magnetic charges could cluster and lead to proton decay prior to 1992 and was awarded a patent for a reactor in 1997 (priority 1992). Many of his observations we have observed in experiments we have conducted and in the ash and reactors of other researchers work we have investigated.
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Now we are getting somewhere! So it was not a weasel destroying LHC!
Can you provide any proof of Celani’s role in investigating the affair, and the names of CERN scientists who supported his analysis?
Oh, and instead of apologising for sharing the Molyneaux video you tell us of all the Indians you had working for you, and you even paid them for that. Ok.
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I have offerred you a live zoom call. You have an email to reach me on.
I think that is enough for now here, you literally have nothing to offer, either of informed criticism or rational demeanour, I suggest you spend at least 200 hours studying LENR, over the course of a few months, so you have a clue when you want to discuss the science with anything approaching credibility.
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So you made it all up about LHC, CERN and Celani? I thought so.
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Tesla Technology! Drink!
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You should get a grant to explore the possibility of FREE ENERGY generated by your powerful troll-magnetic monopoles! I haven’t seen such a flux since the heyday of USENET.
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Yep. Free Energy is awesome because of comes out of nowhere. All chemical reactions that are spontaneous give out Free Energy! So there isnt, and never will be, an energy crisis. Here that, Kristi Noem (governor of South Dakota)?
Kind of like resonance structures of molecules describe the forms it flips back and forth to.
Science has awesome explanatory power.
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It is impossible to produce deuterium through chemical reactions. Even the skeptics acknowledge that the cold fusion researchers are producing deuterium. There is a huge community of scientists who are making a living researching hot fusion. In spite of the fact that the cold fusion folks are producing deuterium, the hot fusion people acknowledge it, and then totally ignore it as if the proof of a nuclear reactions, produced by the cold fusion crowd, was the plague. The refusal to acknowledge that some sort of nuclear reaction is happening, borders on insanity. But then one remembers and old axiom which is true, and never changes: A man’s interests and beliefs are directly related by the degree to which those interests and beliefs, may impact his wallet. Can you imagine what it would do to the hot fusion people, if public money started flowing into cold fusion research. This fellow “Schneider” is probably a great guy. But he is 100% wrong in his conclusions about cold fusion, or lattice confinement fusion, or LENR, or whatever you choose to call it. This is real. And Mr. Schneider is a man trying to hold back the tide.
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Please replace the word “deuterium” with “tritium” in my previous post. I apologize for the confusion. Got one word in my head while meaning another. Please just think of it as a “senior moment” and allow me to exit with some grace.
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I’m so glad you realized you had said deuterium while meant tritium.
There is a rather recent publication by Dimiter Alexandrov (December 2020) that showed production of Helium 3 and Helium 4. You can read the abstract here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/er.6356
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Hi Leonid,
my best compliments, you have done a very good analysis of the underlying reasons behind research misconduct, a phenomenon for which cold fusion provides one of the most striking example, even more astounding after EU Commission funded Hermes and CleanHME projects.
What kind of blatant mistakes Fleischmann and Pons made in their activity on cold fusion is clearly shown by the video they produced to document the huge excess heat they claimed to have obtained during the most famous and celebrated of their experiments: the “1992 Four-Cells Boil-Off” experiment held in April-May 1992 at IMRA laboratory in France (1).
In the paper presented at International Congress on CF in Nagoya in October of the same year (2), the two electrochemists claimed that “the cell would have become half empty 11 minutes before dryness, as observed from the video recordings (…) and this in turn requires a period of intense boiling during the last 11 minutes.”
By this assumption, F&P performed the calculation shown at page 16 of the paper they and deduced an excess heat rate of 144.5 W compared to an electric input of only 37.5 W, so that they concluded: “the excess rate of energy production is about four times that of the enthalpy input even for this highly inefficient system; the specific excess rates are broadly speaking in line with those achieved in fast breeder reactors”.
In the above calculation, the mass of evaporated fluid was estimated at 2.5 Moles of heavy water corresponding to half of the initial electrolyte. This assumption implies that at the beginning of the final emptying out of each cell, marked in the video by the highest position of the blue arrow, the cell would have been full of liquid water. However, looking closely at the video, it is absolutely clear that at that moment each cell is mostly filled with foam, as well described in this comment (3).
A more comprehensive interpretation of what actually happened in each cell during the 1992 boil-off experiment is provided in this jpeg (4), whose images are described here (4a). It is explained how the electrolyte began to evaporate much earlier than the time considered in the F&P calculation, so it took hours instead of minutes to evaporate, at a progressively increasing rate, all the initial water content.
The few minutes considered by F&P in their calculations only represent only the short period of deflation of the foam, previously inflated by the large bubbles produced right at the end of the boiling phase, when the absorbed electric power reached its maximum. This latter foam deflating period is analyzed in more detail in this jpeg (5), which is extensively described here (5a).
So, in conclusion, F&P mistook foam for liquid. Since foam is mostly occupied by gas, the two fathers of CF have documented in their own video how they literally got free energy out of thin air!
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAIIZU6Oj8
(2) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf
(3) https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/thread/2746-fp-s-experiments-discussion/?postID=97015#post97015
(4) https://imgur.com/PTIo42q
(4a) https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/thread/2746-fp-s-experiments-discussion/?postID=97458#post97458
(5) https://imgur.com/syPv8Ia
(5a) https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/thread/2746-fp-s-experiments-discussion/?postID=98684#post98684
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The cold fusion research is extremely fringe and especially the Celani/memorial work feels like a bunch of people stuck very deep in a rabbit hole. Still, the quantumheat.org site does seem to have been continuously up (https://web.archive.org/web/20200613071411/http://www.quantumheat.org/). Hope this comment does not put me in the line of your fire, you keep being you authentic abrasive self it seems.
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The site was really down, I couldn’t even save backups of Google cache in Wayback machine.
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Bob,
Just ignore him. Must be only hot air, if he is not following your kind invitation.
We stay focused and complete our mission.
Best wishes
Gerold
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You folks gather here on my site, to ignore me?
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As a physicist would like to thank Sylvie Coyaud and you Dr. Schneider very much for bringing up this…
Looks like the similarity between Pons and Ponzi is not only in the names.
And this fraud funding (alongside the others you have written about) comes in the worst possible time for humanity when worldwide education deteriorates quickly. As a result of both we already have anti-vax, flat-earth, etc. movements and the trend for them is up.
But the most important loss for science are the people with dignity like Cenek Gregor, Lv Xiang who are the real scientists. Instead we have fraudsters funding each other and multiplying like cancer cells everywhere devouring more and more nutrients from the declining number of true scientists.
Lastly, would like to note that ITER is just like the Human Brain Project, alas one order of magnitude more in funding now and more in near future. Based on the Tokamak idea of Igor Tamm (physics Nobel laureate in 1958) and Andrei Sakharov (designer of the Soviet thermonuclear weapons) and never up to now realized. But quoting you:
“In the worst case the project will provide employment to hundreds of scientists, and they can’t really burn the entire billion without delivering something, anything.”
And even if they do not deliver, they will have a lot of experience and knowledge for the next problem.
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So, billions spent in a project that you were taught is possible, and so far has not produced anything but a lot of promises: “Great, this is the way science progresses, and we also create a lot of jobs!!!”
Peanuts spent in a project you were taught is bunk, even if this was a mere politically driven consensus, but has so far proven to break even thousands of times (even if Ascoli will never accept it, and will never accept the many people telling him that his conclusions are wrong): ”what and outrage!!! how can you finance these frauds!!!! We are doomed as a civilization!!!”.
I applaud your very balanced an unbiased opinion.
Might as well recommend you to read this book.
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You have recognized yourself in my comment “Mr. Ponzi”, that’s great.
I recommend you to keep the lowest possible profile, be shorter than the grass and enjoy your millions very silently. We might not be able to stop you and your fellow fraudsters right now but the day metastasis like you will be removed is coming closer and closer. Therefore, start praying not to be alive when this day comes because you will surely not love the payback at all…
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That certainly sounds like a threat Albert V, not nice at all, you certainly have some issues.
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It is really sad to read that someone that purports himself as a defender of good ethics in Science is so incapable of informing himself and follows the groupthink of others who are as lost. The blind leading the blind.
Pons and Fleischmann experiments and variations of it have been replicated thousands of times, other new approaches have been developed to obtain above break even energy efficiency (something the classic fusion approach has yet to achieve) and a continuously expanding amount of evidence of repeatable nuclear transmutations with or without energy release has been accumulated. Your disbelief or dislike for this body of scientific evidence, which has been produced with an infinitesimal fraction of the budget devoted to classical approaches, doesn’t make it less valid. It only makes you and all who outcry for the finance of this valid and important research, look as a band of ignorant and bigoted fanatic defenders of the status quo. Devote time to study the staggering evidence, and take time to grasp the monumental implications of having come to the wrong conclusions about LENR in its early development, and how much time has been lost pursuing other approaches.
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You sound like a Jehova’s Witness!
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And one might argue that you sound like an Islamic fundamentalist in a jihad against anyone that falls out of the line of the mainstream consensus.
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You confused humour with terror, but what can one expect from a Fuffo
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Hi Osiander,
you are correct in saying that Fleischmann and Pons experiments and variants have been replicated thousands of times, but, as shown in my comment above, the excess energy they claimed was based on a misinterpretation of experimental data, therefore, as well, the same misconduct could have been just replicated many times in the last 30+ years by misinterpreting some apparently positive energy balances, better explainable by mundane artifacts, than by exotic nuclear phenomena.
Even if many of these artifacts can be recognized in the available documentation, it’s impossible to check every single claim, because the related reports usually include only the information useful to support such claims. So the credibility of these findings is usually proclaimed and defended by the CF supporters on the basis of the authors’ trustworthiness, which in turns is primarily based on the reputation of the academic or research institutions they are affiliated with.
Fortunately, the available documentation on the F&P’s boil-off experiment held in 1992 allows us not only to assess the unreliability of the two pioneers of cold fusion, but also of the most important members in the field, and consequently to firmly affirm the unreality of the CF/LENR phenomena.
It happens that the 1993 article in Physics Letters A reporting the 1992 boil-off experiment (1), which is also the last peer reviewed paper published by F&P, was chosen in 2004 by 5 of the most prominent and experienced representatives of the CF community to be submitted to DoE (2), when the US Department allowed a second chance to prove the reality of the CF phenomena, following the fiasco of the first review carried out in late 1989.
Surprisingly, the F&P “Simplicity paper” is the first, just below the review report prepared by the 5 CF representatives, in the short list of 7 documents selected by the same representatives for review (3). So, 15 years after the F&P announcement, the first experiment, selected by 5 top experts of the field to prove the reality of CF, was a bogus test held 12 years earlier, whose absolute incongruity is revealed by the video produced by F&P themselves.
What else do you need to be convinced of the unreality of CF?
Do you really expect that people waste their time in studying thousands of documents which usually start by referencing a couple of electrochemists who mistook foam for liquid?
It’s much better if you devote your time to carefully watch the video of the 1992 boil-off experiment, realize the staggering evidence of errors and nonsense contained in the F&P paper reporting this experiment, and take your time to grasp the monumental implications of having come to the wrong conclusions about CF/LENR reality, and how much money and efforts have been wasted pursuing this nonsensical idea.
(1) http://coldfusioncommunity.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/1993Fleischmann-Pons-PLA-Simplicity.pdf
(2) https://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/government/DOE2004/DOE-2004.shtml
(3) https://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/government/DOE2004/7Papers.shtml
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“Groupthink” is an actual specific concept; it’s more than a pompous pseudo-academic synonym for ‘conformity’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
Readers are invited to look up the defining dynamics and characteristics of ‘groupthink’, to compare them to the behaviour of the Cold Fusion community.
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If you think that the field of research of LENR has any kind of groupthink phenomena ongoing, that can only mean you have never really studied the field.
I have observed groupthink being deeply entrenched in orthodox Academia, at the root of the knee jerk rejection of any new idea that shakes the tree of so called “stablished science”.
LENR is supported in experimental evidence, and there is a constellation of hypothesis and so called theories to explain the observations, so group think does not apply. I would agree that some followers of Rossi do exhibit a groupthink behavior, but that has nothing to do with LENR, and is more of a group of junkies of Rossi that have much more in common with the Trump crowd than with any serious LENR researcher.
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Are you aware that the “orthodox academia” is the proud recipient of many millions of euros, dollar and yen for the purpose of studying cold fusion? And that it is just the conspiracy of Smut, Sylvie Coyaud, Ascoli and myself you are raging against here?
As Brexiters are told these days: YOU WON GET OVER IT!!!
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I would agree that some followers of Rossi do exhibit a groupthink behavior, but that has nothing to do with LENR, and is more of a group of junkies of Rossi that have much more in common with the Trump crowd than with any serious LENR researcher.
I assume that “some followers of Rossi” includes Mats Lewan and the E-Cat crowd, but I am wondering how far it extends. Glad to hear that Rossi is not a not True Scotsman. What is the Scotsman Status of the Lugano test? Parkhomov? Piantelli? McKubre? The MFMP?
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Is it possible to have a list of the participants? I would like to see if there is any nuclear physics expertise at all involved.
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Unfortunately, EU Commission never releases names, personal data protection. I asked Hermes for names of participants, they refused to tell. CleanHME has all the known fuffi on board, see the kick-off meeting program above.
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A message from Prof Pekka Peljo, as reply to my FOI inquiry to his University of Turku:
“The project partners are:
Aliaxander Bandarenka, Technical University of Munich
Jan Macak, Central European Institute of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic
Frederick Maillard, LEPMI/CNRS, France
Tanja Kallio, Aalto University, Finland
Matthias Vandichell, University of Limerick, Ireland
Stephen Skinner, Imperial College, UK
The kick-off meeting was held online 10.-11.11. Here is the program
November 10th 2020
10.30 Welcome coffee
10.45 Opening, welcome (UTU/Pekka)
11.00 Partner introductions, 10 min each (all)
12.15 Lunch break
13.00 Project overview and organisation (UTU/Pekka)
Technical project overview, objectives for year 1
14.30 WP introductions:
WP1 In-situ interface characterization under reaction conditions (TUM)
WP2 Advanced catalyst synthesis (CEITEC)
WP3 Advanced characterization techniques (LEPMI/CNRS)
WP4 Room and intermediate temperature experiments (UTU)
16.00 Coffee break
WP5 High-temperature labelling and diffusion (Imperial)
WP6 Computational techniques (UL)
WP7 Dissemination and exploitation (UTU)
WPs 6 Project management (UTU)
16.30 Close of day 1
November 11th 2020
10.30 Project administration, procedures, reporting (UTU)
11.00 Workshop 1 – Experiments: detailed planning of the first year
12.00 Workshop 2 – Synthesis and modelling: detailed planning of the first year
13.00 Outcome of kick-off meeting: action item list, next meetings
Closure of meeting (around 13.30 o’clock)
Hope this helps.
Also, the project introduction presentation is available online here: http://www.cleanhme.eu/?page_id=345
as we presented our project in the kick-off meeting of the CleanHME project.“
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A message from Pekka Peljo:
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A follow up message from Pekka Peljo, asked to comment of failures to reproduce F&P results and on CleanHME scientists’ own achievements on cold fusion:
“My understanding is that it is very hard to obtain the threshold conditions, especially the high loading ratio of D/Pd. This is summarized in the review chapter 13 in this book. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Developments+in+Electrochemistry%3A+Science+Inspired+by+Martin+Fleischmann-p-9781118694435
and this was also the conclusions of the Google funded project.
Somehow this is claimed to be related to materials science of the Pd-D, and apparently impurities can have a huge effect.
The chapter for example reports a series of experiments, where two out of 24 experiments produced excess heat.
Another thing is, that it reportedly takes up to 3 months of electrolysis to get some strange effects. These experiments have been done using bulk palladium electrodes, but one of the HERMES goals is to utilize nanostructured electrodes to see if we can reach the required threshold conditions. Also, co-electrodeposition experiments where Pd-D is deposited as a thin film on an electrode, seem to have much higher reproducibility rate, so this is another of our research lines.
The approach of CleanHME, in my understanding, is to test Ni with some Li-source in hydrogen atmosphere at high temperatures. I have seen some very bold claims about these systems, but I think better replications are required before they can be accepted. I haven’t reviewed these systems in detail, and they are less interesting to me as an electrochemist. But if CleanHME can produce these replications, I’m prepared to keep an open mind. Additionally, these systems, if successful, seem more practical, as no expensive materials such as Pd and D are required. On the other hand, this was one of the research directions of the Google funded project, but they failed to observe any excess heat. Another of the research lines of the CleanHME are the bombardment experiments, where they plan to shoot some particles (protons, alphas, maybe neutrons, if I remember correctly) on their materials. This is something that is very much outside of my understanding, but the presentations on this topic during their kick-off meeting were convincing.”
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As somebody who worked on this folly in my callow youth, I must say the decision to find such research seems misguided. But I suspect if the EU Commission did not waste their money on this it would be something else – like graphene or making nano-baubles of some kind. Cold fusion (like hot fusion) will never produce usable energy but at least the former is cheaper. It might be better to waste 10 million euros on cold fusion than 20 billion on ITER – the result will be about the same.
I was surprised that Google spent money on CF research and was even more surprised that they were not vilified for doing so. If it was any other funder, they would have been admonished for being foolish. Perhaps it was because they found nothing…
For the Smut Clyde archives, I have head cold fusion supporters suggest that the Ark of the Covenant, various weapons in the Mahabharata are cold fusion devices, and that they are also used for heating Masonic Temples in Scotland (OK, I made the last one up…)
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I wonder what you make of this message Pekka Pelyo sent me: https://forbetterscience.com/2020/12/08/cold-fusion-by-eu-commission-a-fleischmann-pons-revival/#comment-103940
To me it sounds like he himself doesn’t believe in cold fusion, just a ruse to get the grant proposal through 😉
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“Cold fusion (like hot fusion) will never produce usable energy but at least the former is cheaper”. I can partially agree with you in this statement: Hot fusion, specailly in the way that ITER proposes, will never produce usable energy.
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At least I can agree in something with T Green: Hot fusion, specially in the ITER approach, will never produce usable energy.
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the Ark of the Covenant, various weapons in the Mahabharata are cold fusion devices
Not just a capacitor as per Von Daniken?
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The Mahabharata makes for more sense when you realise that it’s all perfectly literal accounts of steampunk aeronautical vehicles dogfighting over the Indus Valley, recorded by Vedic-era observers.
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“ Are you aware that the “orthodox academia” is the proud recipient of many millions of euros, dollar and yen for the purpose of studying cold fusion? And that it is just the conspiracy of Smut, Sylvie Coyaud, Ascoli and myself you are raging against here?
As Brexiters are told these days: YOU WON GET OVER IT!!!”
Are you aware that the total amount of money spent on LENR research (which is carried out by many researchers both in the Academic, public and private entities, but always at great personal cost and under constant question and harassing from the likes as you) on the 30 years since the announcement of Pons and Fleischmann, is an infinitesimal proportion of what is being spent in the research of truly Orthodox Academia backed ITER? I really think that you don’t have a clue.
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You are a silly person. Now your only argument is: but the other project got more money! Most scientists never get such grants like cold fusion did in their whole lives.
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